During the past five years, we synthesized and compiled data on historic and recent fish collections in West Virginia into a georeferenced database. The West Virginia fish database will be used to produce a spatial and temporal atlas of fish distributions and currently includes over 9,000 site records from fish collections during 1853 to 2005. Species distribution data will be depicted by time periods, reflecting the substantial contributions and efforts of Ebenezer Andrews, Spencer Baird, Charles Bollman, William Hay, E.L. Goldsborough, Carl Hubbs, and Laura Hubbs, Milton Trautman, A.H. Wright, John Addair, Ed Raney, L.W. Wilson, E.A. Seaman, P.E. Swasey, H. Van Meter, Anthony Bodola, Frank Schwartz, Ron Preston, Bob Denoncourt, Charles Hocutt, Jay Stauffer, Rich Raesly, West Virginia Division of Natural Resources personnel, as well as collections from the present authors. Over 2,000 of the 9,000 site records are represented at museums, and we have verified species identifications of most of the individual lots of these records at Cornell University, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, American Museum of Natural History, North Carolina State Museum, U.S. National Museum, and Ohio State University Museum. Additionally, we included dichotomous keys (with illustrations) for identification of families, genera, and species.
